As a liberal progressive voter, I believe it is our patriotic duty to pay taxes for public amenities that make our quality of life great, like public safety.

This ing April, though, Grand Junction City Council will ask voters to increase the City’s bined sales tax rate from the current 8.02% to a whopping 9.16%, a rate even higher than the City of Boulder.

City Council has very good arguments for needing more money: we need more fire stations, emergency response times are too long, and we have roads and bridges in need maintenance and repair.

Of course City residents want the safety and security of these amenities, but the City hasn’t done anywhere near all it could to make the best use of revenues it already has, and to create new revenue streams to fund City necessities before it goes to City residents with a request that they pay such a big increase in city sales tax.

The City squanders existing taxpayer money

The City has been a poor steward of the money it already gets from taxpayers, spending irresponsibly and prolifically.

For example, Grand Junction has been handing CMU huge amounts of money for decades. No other municipality in the state funnels money to a pubic university the way Grand Junction does.

In 2008, the city started giving CMU $500,000 a year to buy the land and homes surrounding it so it could expand. The City has been paying CMU $500,000 every year for the last 20 years, and has even mitted to pay this amount to CMU annually through 2027. That’s tens of millions of dollars the City has been funneling to CMU when it could have using it to fund actual City needs all this time, like the new fire stations, emergency response infrastructure, road improvements and park development it now needs.?

Most cities just partner with public universities in their midst to share public infrastructure, or split the costs of new amenities that city residents can also use. No cities shovel money to public universities the way Grand Junction does.? It needs to re-think this if the City has dire public safety needs, and those needs should be the first priority for taxpayer funds.?

The $64,000 plaza in front of Grand Junction City Hall, installed to circumvent the U.S. Constitution and keep the religious Ten mandments tablet on public land.

In 2001, the City also unnecessarily spent $64,000 on the “Cornerstones of Law and Liberty Plaza,” also known as “The Graveyard in Front of City Hall,” to get out from under a lawsuit the ACLU brought on behalf of local citizens who simply asked the City to move the Ten mandments tablet off City property to ply with separation of church and state. The City could have solved the dilemma fast, and for free. A church a block away offered to help the City avoid the lawsuit by taking the tablet off the City’s hands and displaying it prominently on their property nearby, but the City of Grand Junction would have none of that. Instead, City Council dug in,?voted to spend $64,000 taxpayer dollars to build the “Plaza,” so they could put the Ten mandments tablet into a more “historical context,” get the City out from under the lawsuit and show those smart-alecky secular City residents that the City doesn’t HAVE to ply with the Constitution if it doesn’t WANT to.

The City also spends $6,480 every year on a top-level membership in the Grand Junction Area Chamber of merce, even though the City isn’t a business and gets nothing of value for the money. The chamber also lobbies city council for policies that benefit big business, so the City is paying the Chamber to lobby itself. It’s nonsensical. What does the City get for its top-level membership every year? Its logo on the Chamber’s web page, a table at the Chamber’s annual banquet, sponsorship of a hole at the Chamber’s annual golf tournament and other meaningless?perks that don’t have any benefit for City residents.

That money could be used to address City needs, and the the City and the Chamber should get less cozy and operate strictly at arm’s length from each other.

The City is leaving LOTS of additional sources of revenue on the table

Colorado’s new marijuana economy is bringing big benefits to towns that embrace it.

The City has shown little will or creativity when it es to creating other revenue streams to help fund City needs.

For example, City Council still refuses to allow the retail sale of marijuana within City limits. In so doing, it continues to deny citizens a huge, steady and legitimate new source of revenue.?Towns and cities all around G.J. are benefitting from marijuana revenues swelling their coffers and helping them rebuild infrastructure like sidewalks, drainage and sewers. It’s allowing them to build new public amenities like basketball courts, boat ramps and camp grounds. The Town of Parachute?doubled its sales tax revenues?from pot taxes, taking in a whopping $1.6 million in 2016 alone. Marijuana taxes now make up half the revenue of the City of DeBeque. Marijuana is now a huge?$1.5 billion market in Colorado, generating over $200 million in revenue for local jurisdictions state-wide, and we get zero, zip, while Grand Junction holds its hand out and begs citizens for more sales tax revenue.

And retail pot taxes aren’t the only money the City of Grand Junction is leaving on the table. They are forsaking revenue from elsewhere, too.

The City could also tax vape products and the nicotine fluids they use, but they aren’t.

The Municipal Code also exempts from sales tax a host of other products, like seeds and orchard trees, livestock feed, farm implements and electricity used in manufacturing. City Council could re-vamp the City’s Municipal Code to permit levying reasonable taxes on these items. There is also currently no city tax on gasoline, which for the first time in years just dipped to under $2.00/gallon.

The City could levy a small fee on single-use plastic bags and containers to reduce their use, cut the amount of plastic going into the landfill, clean up the environment and generate extra revenue.? It could also tax intangible products and services, like the sale of digital products and financial transactions.

Why isn’t the City even considering any of these things possibilities before it asks us for more money?

The City of Grand Junction could tax cigarettes to raise additional revenue. The City charter currently prohibits it, but Aspen charges a cigarette tax of $3.00/pack, and Basalt charges $2.00/pack

Boulder gets more amenities for its residents from sales taxes than we do.

The oft-reviled City of Boulder has a total bined City and County sales tax rate of 8.45%. It includes a tax on food.

What do those tax revenues pay for?

0.5% (5 cents on a $10 purchase) is a “Worthy Cause” sales tax, a 15 year initiative that goes to nonprofit human services agencies to build housing, provide health services, fund Meals on Wheels, homeless shelters and mental health. 0.1% of it is an open space tax that’s been in place since the 1960s, that pays for the purchase and maintenance of open space parks and trails. 0.5% of Boulder’s total City and County sales tax is a perpetual public safety sales tax that funds their local jail and its expansion, a detox/addiction recovery center, programs to reduce jail crowding, reduce recidivism and diversion for mentally ill offenders. 0.1% (one cent on a $10.00 purchase) goes towards roadway improvements, mobility programs, road safety projects, congestion reduction, cycling shoulders, repair of roads and bridges and other transportation needs.

That’s a lot of good stuff going back to the munity.

What do we get for our sales taxes? Money going to CMU and the Chamber and dumb things like the Plaza that helped the City circumvent the Constitution.

Grand Junction can do better drumming up revenue and being more responsible with the money it already gets.

Grand Junction is a home rule city, so it can set its own sales and use taxes, but City leaders haven’t shown much will or creativity in finding ways to generate revenues from other sources, even ones right under their noses.? The city also needs to start saying “no” to influential local entities like CMU and the Chamber, that can access other sources of funding and that don’t return any tangible benefits for public safety or amenities for residents.

Taxpayer money should be spent first and foremost on City necessities and enhancing the lives, health and safety of citizens. Fire, police, emergency responders and public safety needs are high on that list.

Before the City asks its residents to pay more sales tax, it needs to demonstrate that it is being more responsible with the money it has, and open itself to taking advantage of obvious sources of money sitting at its feet that is has been ignoring.

In October 2018, munity Hospital and Centura Health Network signed a?letter of intent to merge. It provided each party with a 120 day-long window to evaluate the deal and decide whether or not to go ahead and finalize it.

Those 120 days are almost up, and a final decision on the merger must be made by February 10th.

Donald Trump just put America through the longest federal government shutdown in history, single-handedly keeping over 800,000 federal workers from being paid for over a month, hobbling law enforcement agencies and airport security, blocking immigration proceedings, causing delays in airline flights across the country, forcing hundreds of thousands of people into having to make hard decisions between paying their mortgages, buying their medicine or feeding their kids.

In the end, neither Mr. Trump nor the country gained anything at all from this exercise, but we did learn some important lessons from it.

The Grand Junction Police Department needs your help to identify a male suspect that is wanted for harassment.

On Wednesday, January 2nd , an unknown male placed a malicious classified ad in “The Nickel” stating the victim’s house was “For Sale by Owner.” Security cameras capture a white male in his 50’s with a gray beard and last seen wearing a dark colored coat, blue jeans and a baseball cap. The surveillance photo of the suspect can be viewed at?http://www.241stop..

If you know the identity or location of the suspect involved in this crime, please contact Crime Stoppers at (970) 241-7867. Information reported to Crime Stoppers that leads to an arrest can earn you up to $1,000 cash reward and you will remain pletely anonymous. For more information, see us at?http://www.241stop..

The third annual Women’s March in Grand Junction on Saturday, January 19th, drew an enthusiastic crowd of about 2,000 liberal and progressive western slope residents who came out to support women’s rights, equality for women and gay, lesbian and transgender people, people of color and immigrant munities.

House Rep. Scott Tipton voted to keep inflicting financial pain on government employees to help President Trump extort American taxpayers for $5.6 billion to pay for a 2,000 mile wall between the U.S. and Mexico. (Chart courtesy of the Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction.)

The western slope’s House representative in Washington, D.C., Scott Tipton, voted AGAINST a bill on Jan. 6 to end President Trump’s shutdown for most federal agencies.

The bill, HR 265, passed the House by a wide margin — 243 to 183 — and would have funded most of the parts of government that are shut down, including food safety inspections, child nutrition programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program), rural utilities programs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Farm Credit programs and other crucial agencies and functions on which Americans depend.

On December 12 the Ridgway Town Council?passed an ordinance?(pdf) banning single-use plastic bags and urging residents to curtail their use of other single-use plastics like straws, single-use food take-out containers, coffee stirrers, soda bottles, disposable water bottles, eating utensils and food packaging.

The ordinance states single-use plastics have “severe negative impacts on the environment” on both a local and global scale, that they “contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, litter, atmospheric acidification,” and cause problems with water sources and harm wildlife. Ridgway’s Town Council also passed the ordinance to help reduce the amount of waste going into the town’s landfill.

Utilizing a novel form of harassment, someone put a malicious classified ad in the January 3 edition of?The Nickel Classified Ads saying our house was for sale “by owner” at a lowball price, and that there will be an open house Jan 11-13. Whoever placed the ad used our numeric street address and included a verbal description of our home. They did not include a phone number in the ad.

We found out about it after a realtor came to our house with the hard copy of the ad in?The Nickel in hand and showed it to us.

Colorado State Senator Ray Scott tried to deceive his constituents in a recent Facebook post.

In the post, Scott pointed to a recent?Denver Post article about how Colorado’s marijuana tax revenues are being used, and used the benefit of a sharply truncated headline and added an ominously intro to create the perception that the legislature is misusing marijuana funds. About marijuana tax money, Scott wrote, “If you thought it went to schools this will enlighten you”.

Below is Scott’s actual post (forwarded to me by a friend, because Ray Scott blocks me from his Facebook page):

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WCAF’s 2018 winter billboard in Grand Junction, up now in front of Hobby Lobby on I-70 business loop (on the board facing west).

The non-profit group Western Colorado Atheists and Freethinkers?(WCAF) has a digital billboard up on I-70 Business Loop in front of Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A for Christmas that says “Make Christmas great again. Skip church!”

The sign is a reminder that the holiday focus should be more on kindness, humanity and ethical treatment of others than on organized religion, which has been proving problematic lately, and to a horrific degree.

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